Taggle, the group buying site, has announced that its closing shop. I had met John Kuruvilla last year when the the frenzy around Groupon was big. Soon that died down. Here's what I had written after that meeting with John. I am reproducing my piece again. Take a look:
A few weeks back I met John Kuruvilla of Taggle.com. John was explaining to me his vision for Taggle and how group buying is a brand new concept and an unexplored territory in India. Groupon was just in the news with a phenomenal bid from Google. So it did’nt take long for me to see what John was up to.
Strangely enough, ten years back, I was sitting across a table with Sudhakar who was explaining me how his e-commerce site, Fabmall is an amazing idea and unexplored territory in India. The biggest role model, of course was Amazon.
It did not take long for Fabmall to see that e-commerce wasn’t hot in India. Sudhakar and his company had to turn to brick-and-mortar business. His idea was ahead of the market. He had to fall-back to a more traditionalbusiness. Fabmall went through several changes and today exists as Indiaplaza (www.indiaplaza.com).
e-commerce did not take off for a long time in India. Today though it is fast becoming a standard feature of any service. Thanks to IRCTC, MakeMyTrip and ClearTrip kind of sites online transactions are not dreaded anymore.
Yesterday, e-commerce was the holy grail. Today, building businesses around social networking is the rage. Taggle is a very interesting concept. Speaking to John set me thinking about how new trends emerge. Then I also dwelt upon how the concepts have to go through fire before they get established.
Most often in our entrepreneurial journey, we pick up an idea which appears to be a winner but suddenly the world around it appears to crumble. That is when not to lose heart. Turn to a more traditional approach but do not give up on your idea. As long as you keep stoking the fire in your idea, the market opens up to it eventually.
I do not want to sound like a self help guru. What I can see is that another set of technologies led by the success of social networking is promising to change the world. Don’t lose heart if you do not see any take-off immediately. Dig in your heals and keep your head. For instance, we have been hearing about m-commerce for a long time. Perhaps, its time is now as smartphones are becoming the first screen for information consumption. I am just taking the example of m-commerce. This philosophy holds good for any business.
Taggle changed its business model from selling group deals on services to group deals on products. It claims to have grown its customer base 10 times in 3 months.
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